The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Work Less This Summer (And Still Get MORE Done)

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

I’m re-releasing this popular episode because so many of you have been sharing how hard it is to focus on your work right now. The answer? Work smarter, not harder. My guest is a best-selling author and professor at Georgetown University, Cal Newport, and he shares exactly how to work less and get way more done (while also feeling happier and calmer). So many of us are stuck in a cycle of answering emails all day, sitting on Zoom meetings, but never really moving the ball forward in our work or in our lives, and this episode is going to change that. I've used so many of the tactics from this interview to restructure my workdays and how I run my business. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • 3 principles to follow to do less and accomplish more • Science-backed strategies to improve focus • The biggest time drains on your day (and how to fix them) • What to do to build toward the career of your dreams • And so much more For more from Cal Newport: • Website: www.calnewport.com  • Books: https://calnewport.com/writing/ Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Puori: visit https://Puori.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY at checkout for a discount and special offer. • Masterclass: head to MasterClass.com/LizMoody for an additional 15% off. • Our Place: check out FromOurPlace.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY for 10% off sitewide. • Seed: go to Seed.com/LizMoody and use code LIZMOODY to get 25% off your first month. • LMNT: visit DrinkLMNT.com/Liz to get a FREE 8-count sample pack with any order. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 450. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode is with somebody that I have been a fan of for a very, very, very long time. I have read many of his mega bestselling books over the years, and it was such an honor to get to sit down and ask him all of my most pressing questions. And it paid off already. I've used so many of the tactics that I learned in this interview to restructure my work days and how I run my business and they have helped so much. Cal Newport is a professor at Georgetown University. He has written seven books including multiple New York Times bestsellers like Deep Work, which sold over 1.5 million copies and took the world by storm and digital minimalism. His newest book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

This episode dives deep into how to work less and get way more done while feeling happier and calmer. So many of us are stuck in a cycle of answering emails. all day, sitting on Zoom meetings all day, but never really moving the ball forward in our work or in our lives. And this episode is going to change that. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we believe that there is always something that you can do to create a life that feels amazing. And we help you figure out how to find the lever to pull at any moment to actually do that. Cal Newport, welcome to the pod. Well, thanks for having me on. I'm so excited to have to have you. I'm so excited to

have you here. Let's dive right into it. Can you define pseudo-productivity and how it differs from actual productivity? Souter productivity is my term for what we implicitly refer to when we think about what productivity means in knowledge work. So it's like what we implicitly rely on when we think about what does it mean to be productive? And I define it to be a heuristic that says we will use visible activity as a proxy for doing something useful. So it's an activity-based notion of productivity, the more I see you do things, the longer you do things, the more productive, I'm going to assume you are. And that's basically the unwritten law of the land in knowledge work right now. Can you define knowledge work just so we're all starting off with the same framework of terms?

Yeah, it's one of those squirrely sort of terms. You can't quite nail it down exactly. There's formal definitions such as a job in which your primary goal is to add value to information using your brain. I like to think about it more. If you look at it more, if you look get a computer for most of your day and or you get upset about email, you're probably a knowledge worker. So I think that informal definition probably captures a lot more detailed than the formal ones. Are there any metrics or maybe like a checklist that we can reference in our heads that we could use if we're trying to identify if something in our workday is actually pseudo productive or if it's real productive, it can be really hard to tell sometimes. Part of the problem is that the actual things

you're doing that produce value, bring with them administrative overhead. So if I have a particular thing I'm doing, I'm producing a marketing white paper for my company. That white paper has value, right? Because we're going to put it out there. It's going to bring in customers. There's administrative overhead that goes with that project. So I have to send emails to people to sort of gather things to get approvals. There's some meetings that have to be scheduled to talk about what we want in it. that administrative overhead is not bad. It's necessary to get what you need to do the project. Where we get in the real problem with pseudo-productivity, however,

is when we allow too many of these projects to stack up, the administrative overhead begins to take over more and more of our day. And then there's very little time left for the actual working on the project piece, and most of our day is doing email in between meetings. That's when we really see the ugly side of pseudo-productivity raise its head. I also find one of the big problems is the administrative stuff, gives you that hit of I've accomplished something. And you talk about in your book all of these things that happen over months and even years,

you're not getting that hit of like, oh, I've actually done something, which is why I find myself even veering towards or favoring pseudo productivity. Well, yeah. So if pseudo productivity is just implicitly how you're being judged, it makes a lot of sense that I want to throw a lot of stuff on my plate. So I always have administrative overhead I can churn through. I'm going to look really busy because if busyness is what's rewarded, why not then from a rational perspective make your day really busy.

But on the other hand, if you had an outcome-based notion of productivity, like we care about what you produce and how good it is, then suddenly you see this all differently. You're like, wait a second, a day spent frantically sending email messages and jumping on the meetings, that's no longer a good productive day. That's a day that's really getting in the way of what I really want to do, which is to finish these projects. The frame we use to think about productivity is what determines what we think a productive day should look like.

And it's so interesting because I think that's external, but I also think it's intrinsic at this point. Like I think I measure my day by did I clear my email inbox? Did I check off all these tasks? And it can be hard for me to feel a personal sense of satisfaction if I can't really measure it if it's this part of this larger hole that I might not even have my head fully around at the moment. Yeah, I think we have fully internalized pseudo productivity. It's why when I talk to like a freelancer or a solo entrepreneur where there is no boss, they can do whatever they want, they can choose what they work on and how they work on it, they still find themselves all day long frantically jumping from email to email, meeting the meeting, because we really have internalized

it because it is the only option that we really have had. Since knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector in the mid-20th century, suitor productivity has really been the only game in town. And one of my big arguments is that it's not working. Souter productivity, especially plus modern technology, that's a really bad mixture. And it's going to lead to burnout. It's going to lead to unhappiness. It's going to lead to companies struggling too because not enough valuables being produced. We're in a bad moment right now because pseudo-predictivity isn't working in a world of email and Slack in meetings. It's a volatile combination. Okay. So I want to unpack it from the external pressures and the internal pressures perspective. Let's start with internal. If I'm going about my day

and I'm not marking it by checking these things off the to-do list. How many emails have I sent? How many Zoom meetings have I completed? How can I get that sense of satisfaction at the end of the day? You have to shift your mindset towards what am I finishing and how good is it? What over the last month? What over the last two months? We need a bigger time frame here.

What have I finished that is valuable and how good was it? Like if that becomes the source of your pride, then whether or not you got through a lot of emails in a given day becomes unrelated or irrelevant. Like, who cares? What matters is, what did I produce over the last month? Because once you move to that bigger time frame, you're not going to remember the number of emails you sent or the number of meetings you attended. When you say, how did last month go? You don't say it was fantastic because I sent 500,000 emails. And this was a great number for me. You're not going to remember the emails. You're going to say, I finished these two reports. I got this business strategy out. We turned around

the whole philosophy of our marketing team, whatever it is. It's the actual unambiguously valuable accomplishments, that's what you want to turn your mind towards, this is what I care about, and this is what I derive my professional pride from. Okay, so then let's zoom out on that for a second, because principle one in your book is do fewer things, which sounds like what you're speaking to right now. We want to do less things, but we want to derive our professional pride from them. We want to feel really good about doing those things. But it begs the question, how do we know what things we should actually be doing? Even the fact that that that's the problem, a hard question to answer tells us the trouble that we are in in knowledge work right now,

because we have been so focused on pseudo productivity and busyness that it is actually difficult for a lot of people at first when you say, yeah, but what is the core thing you do that's most valuable? The thing that's hard to replicate or for someone without your training or experience to do, a lot of people take a beat on that question. Well, wait a second, that's a good question. Let me think about that. We've become so alienated from our actual skilled labor that it's almost a difficult ask to figure out what is it that we do that's valuable. But what I recommend is take some time to do essentially like a journalistic investigation on your own job.

Actually, like look at your job like you're a business journalist. Well, what do we do as a company? What does this team do? Of the things I've been involved with, what are the things that move the needle? What are the things that helps this team or company be more successful, bring in more value? it's not unusual for that to actually take some time for you to figure out. It's not obvious for a lot of people anymore because suitor productivity has obfuscated it. Without getting too into the weeds, one problem I have when I'm trying to zoom out is I'm like,

well, yes, but we're releasing two podcasts this week. And all of these tiny tasks need to get done to actually have those podcasts come out. And we need to do this to get our social content out and all these different things that actually need to happen on a daily or weekly. just to keep the company in maintenance mode, much less moving towards our outside goals. How do we deal with that balance? You have two things you have to combine here typically. So one is actually just doing fewer things at once.

Where does all the small things come from? Well, each big thing brings with it its own small things. So if there's too many big things, the number of urgent small things begins to take over the day. And this begins past a certain threshold to get in the way of finishing the big things and everything slows down. So the sort of blunt response is, can we reduce the number of things we're doing it once so that the amount of administrative overhead is not taking over the whole day? Once you've done that, the more specific answer is, okay, now let's take the administrative overhead that remains and let's tame its impact on our schedule.

So this could mean a lot of things. Partially this could mean, for example, let's get rid of unscheduled communication. Maybe we have office hours and team stand up so we can have back and forth not happen over email or slack. at a set time each day, like let's boom, boom, boom, go through five or six things all at once. It might mean putting processes in the place. Well, we sort of know these podcasts come out on these days. These things need to happen. These posts need to happen to social.

This copy editing has to happen on the description. Let's work out our process for this so we know when and how that work happens and when and how each person's involved in it. So it's not unfolding haphazardly. Often what we're trying to avoid with administrative overhead is not the total number of minutes it requires, but the distraction or interruptions it generates. So if I can take a lot of work that's regular, and instead of having it unfold over just ad hoc slack messages, have it built into a system where I know when and how to do my pieces,

the footprint on my day there is going to be much smaller, even if the total number of minutes I spend on it might be the same in both scenarios. So we reduce what we work on at once, and then we tame the expected administrative overhead that goes along with the work that remains. Okay, I'm going to calm myself out here a little bit, but I find myself using messaging my team as almost a way to procrastinate or to seek connection or I'm trying to sit down and do this deeper work to prep for a podcast to do an edit on something

and my mind is drifting and wandering and I'm getting distracted and so I use that to band-aid the fact that it's getting harder and harder to focus on these bigger, harder tasks. So do you suggest that we just cut that out and work on the focus component or how should we approach that? Probably, especially if not everyone's in the same location. And here's why. The productivity poison that we really need to be worried about right now in our current moment is context shifts. When I have to change what I'm paying attention to from one target to another, that's an expensive neurological operation. If I'm exposed to an interruption, an email or a message that comes through, the cost is not just the 30 seconds it

takes to look at that message, it's the context shift that initiates within my brain. My brain begins to shift over, oh, we're going to think about this now. It's an expensive, messy process. And so what happens is if I have a quick interruption, that can reduce my cognitive capacity on the original thing I was doing for 10 to 20 minutes because it cycled me out of where my brain actually was. So in the modern digital office, one of the real killers is having to keep change your context back and forth.

So lots of emails, lots of slack, this keeps you in a sort of constant muddled state of colliding cognitive context, which is exhausting. It makes it hard to think. Now, in the old world where we're all in the same office, if you're looking to procrastinate a little bit, which is completely natural, or just get some connection because you're feeling a little bit exhausted, you're able to get all these cues from people. Okay, here's someone getting coffee. So, like, I can go chat with them, right? And I'm not causing a contact shift. Oh, that person's in their office.

The door is shut. Well, I'm not going to like knock on their door and interrupt them if I'm just looking to chat. But when we go to complete virtual, we don't know who's getting their metaphorical coffee and who has their metaphorical door shut. And so now everyone is having their context shifted constantly. It's really this need to switch our attention between so many different things throughout the day that exhausts us mentally. It's why by 2 o'clock we can't concentrate anymore. It's why we end up just going in our email inbox and cherry picking out the messages we can answer real easily because our brain is tapped out. our brain is done. You've exhausted me. You've run me in this weird context shifting way. No moths. I'm not

going to think anymore. We don't realize we're doing it. We think, oh, it just work is hard and I'm tired. But it's actually accidentally abusing the way our brain operates. So how can we signal to our coworkers? I'm getting coffee right now. I want a little break. I want to chat. Yeah. If you're completely virtual, you can actually have, for example, a coffee break Slack channel. Like you can actually have a place where people are, the expectation is if someone's not on there, we don't expect them to see your chat, but you might see who's over there. Oh, there's people on there right now that are working on their email and kind of just chatting, but if I'm doing something serious, I'm not on there. So you can simulate that. The other thing you can do is structure sociality. Hey, we're all going to get together and talk at this point at that point. But when it comes to actual work collaboration, really try to minimize what I call unscheduled interruption. So like messages that are going to arrive, but I don't know when. But whenever, they do arrive, I need to respond to relatively quickly. That actually becomes the operation that you're trying to minimize, because if there's a lot of unscheduled messages in your collaborative operation, that means I have to keep checking these channels all the time because I never know

when something's going to come in. If I have to check these channels all the time, I'm going to see stuff all the time, and now I've destroyed my brain. So now I'm operating at 50% of my capacity, and my brain is going to tap out at one or two in the afternoon. We have to think about what happens between our ears, that piece of machinery and how it really operates, it's really important when trying to design how to make a really sustainable sort of creatively nourishing workplace. Okay, so I want to identify a few problems I would run into in trying to implement that and then have you solve them. One for me is the focus component. So if I'm not distracting myself, I've trained my brain in so, so many ways to have a harder time focusing. How can I train it back

to being able to focus for longer periods of time? One of the things I talk about in the new book is the way that artists and writers and other people who do incredibly difficult creative tasks, focus is their whole skill, their whole careers built on this skill. A couple of things they do is rituals and locations. So when it comes time to do something that requires a lot of focus, they don't just turn their eye from right here to right here. Okay, I'm done with my email. Let me start writing my novel. They have a whole ritual they'll do. I'm going to brew a certain cup of tea.

I'm going to go for a walk for 10, 15 minutes and just let my head clear. And then they really care about locations. All right, for this type of really focused work, I'm doing this somewhere different than where I do my bills and where I do my email. Mary Oliver really had to get pretty deep into the woods before she could write her poetry. David McCola had a really nice home office. It was very modern at his house in West Tisbury, but he went to this garden shed in his backyard to do the writing.

Because when he got out there, his mind said, it's writing time. And that's very different from all the exciting stuff happening in his home office, the agents and the publicity. So rituals and location really can make a difference in helping your mind shift from the sort of busy mode to the, I really want to focus and produce something mode. And I know you're not a fan of social media. You don't have social media yourself. And in deep work, you suggest people eliminating it, seeing how that sits with them. I cannot eliminate social media. It's a huge part of my job.

And I think a lot of people want to try to find a balance with social media. Do you have any suggestions for somebody who doesn't want to get rid of it completely, but wants to start to fix their relationship with focus and distraction? You take time away from it to learn what you miss, right? I call this the digital declutter. I'm going to take 30 days without using all the optional digital technology in my life, the social media, the watching the videos online, etc. right? I want to see what I miss. I also want to see what life feels like without those things. What do I pick up? What do I spend time on instead? I want to sample life without it. And then when it's done, you say, okay, what do I want to bring back? And the metaphor here is like how Mary Condo would clean a closet. She would say, empty everything out of that closet and then just put back in the stuff that sparks joy. That's very different than taking a very messy closet and just bringing in organizers and trying to like move things around and make piles. She said, no, just. Just.

put back in what you really need. That's what we need to do with our digital lives. Instead of just trying to bring in better organizers, like, well, I'm going to have rules about when I use Instagram versus TikTok and whether I do it here or there. Just take it all out of the closet. And then see, like, okay, what do I really need back in my life? What happens is when people do this is typically not full abstention from all social media, but a greatly reduced social media footprint or the social media they bring back. They know why they're bringing it back. So it's easier to put fences around. If you're the artist who brings back Instagram because you get inspiration by following the photos posted by other artists you like, you realize I don't need Instagram on my phone. It takes me 20 minutes to see the new artwork posted each week by the artist I follow.

It can be on my laptop. I can do it on Friday. It could be a ritual with a glass of wine. It takes 30 minutes. I get inspired. And that can be all the time I need to spend on Instagram. So once you realize why you're using these tools, you can really get much more specific about how you actually use them. Can I ask how you use your interstitial time, like those little pockets of five,

10 minutes where you're not doing work or the time where your brain is just tired and you want to zone out at the end of a day? I'm a big proponent of time blocking. So I look at my day and I say, what do I want to do during my work day and I make a plan for it? So what I'm doing is just executing that plan. And if I'm tired, that plan's going to have a lot less work than a day when maybe I have a lot of energy.

I'm going to put more work in it. I'm pretty careful about balancing out. okay, hard thinking should probably be earlier in the day for me. If I have smaller pockets of time, I'll either leave them empty or have something like go for a walk or I'll put a bunch of small stuff in there. Like, okay, great. Now I can do these little small tasks. I don't have to think about.

Why don't I wait until later in the day when I'm tired? But the key to my thinking about time is to make a plan in advance as opposed to just keep asking, okay, what next? When we just keep asking, okay, what do I want to do next? We end up this on-demand style of scheduling tends to create schedules that not only are not very productive, but also tend to be exhausting and we fall behind on things and we're not balancing well, rest with work. And so I'm a big proponent of this is, let me move my time around like chess pieces before the day begins and try to build the best possible board as

opposed to just rock and rolling and trying to figure out on the fly what's going to make sense. And you do that every morning in the morning? I do it in the morning. Yeah. I call it multi-scale planning. At the beginning of the week, I'll make a plan for the week. So I really want to look ahead and say like, oh, Thursday has a lot of free time. So that's what I'm going to work on this. Oh, Monday is really, really busy. Or Friday is really, really busy. So I better get this thing done on Wednesday.

I like to look at the full week. And when I look at the full week, I move things around. So I might realize, like, hey, I scheduled this call for Wednesday morning. But that one call is the only thing that's preventing me from being able to spend all morning finishing this book chapter. Okay, let me move that call now. You know, I'm looking ahead and seeing, like, I need three hours free some point. I make a weekly plan.

And then each day, I make a plan for my time. So the weekly plan is higher granularity. It's sort of looking at the calendar and big blocks of time and roughly figuring out when am I going to work on the big things or if there's something urgent, let me get that on the calendar now. And then each day I'm looking at the smaller grain of here's my schedule for the day. Here's the free time in the day. What do I want to do in the free time, giving your time a job? And what are some examples you said like doing little tasks, but I assume you're not just doing some form of work all day. You have some equivalent of what the rest of us are doing when we're reaching for Instagram and scrolling for 10 minutes before meetings to just turn

our brain off. What are you doing in that time? For the most part, what I try to do is I work and then finish. So I'd rather just finish work earlier than work a full day with more breaks in it. I'll have a variety of work. Like, okay, go right, do a bunch of small tasks, go to this meeting, shut these things down, this final interview, and be done for the day. My thought is when I'm working, I'm working when I'm not, I'm not. Be very intentional when I'm working, but also be very generous to myself. And if I'm going to do that, don't try to schedule eight or nine hour days, because humans can't really work all out all day, all year. That's very unnatural. We need a lot more variety. Now, in a pseudo-productivity environment, you can pad your work with lots of busyness

and so you can fill out eight hours every day. But once you start to remove that from your life, your schedule, just in terms of the length of time you're working, it gets pretty varied. You know, there's days you're not working that much and other days you're working more. So when it's really just getting down to trying to just do the things that are really important, you have a lot more variation in what a workday looks like. Did you know that more than two-thirds of protein powders tested have lead levels above California's Prop 65 safety limits? And in some cases, they have more than 10 times over. This is so important because protein is something that a lot of us consume every single day trying to be healthier. And then we're consuming something that's actually making us

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directly like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest, this is like a use case. I don't hear a lot of talking about. I'll just watch it for entertainment when I want to do something that's far more interesting than scrolling. Christina Aguilera taught me to sing. Shan Boudrum's Art of Mastering Confidence and Sex Appeal class. It's 10 out of 10. There's menopause classes with leading doctors. There's script writing with Mindy Kaling. Literally, you name it, they're on masterclass, and it is such a good way to get off your phone, but have something that's like not quite as long or hard to get into as a TV show or a movie and that it just keeps you entertained and interested.

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at masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. Head to masterclass.com slash Liz Moody to see the latest offer. Okay, one more question on that and then we'll go back to the problems that I'm facing that I'd like you to solve for me. But at the end of a long day, let's say you're really tired. What are you doing to feel restored, feel replenished to zone out? I don't know if you believe in zoning out before you go to bed. I mean, a lot of it's time with my kids. I rarely, if ever, work past five because I want to make sure of maximizing that time. And often it's earlier because they'll be coaching or other things that are going on. So time with family is a big one for me. I read a lot. So to me, reading's really relaxing. I'm into movies, sort of a cinephile.

So I really like movies, walking. I do some making in the sense of like microelectronics, a 3D printing and circuits. And I do that with my boys. I have a little. lab here at my podcast studio. So I do have these various hobbies lurking around, which I do enjoy. Yeah, I mean, here's my big thing. When you're done working, be done working. In fact, I have a whole routine. I call it a schedule shutdown ritual where you do a whole sort of psychological ritual

to end your workday, where you identify any open loops that are just in your head and you make sure that gets written down somewhere that it's not in your head. Do you have a plan for tomorrow? There's nothing you're missing. I have a checkbox on my planner. And when I check that, box. That means I've shut down the day. There are no open loops. If later in the evening, little rumination voice pops up, but what about this? What about that? I can just say,

nope, I checked that check that checkbox, which means I reviewed everything. We were clear to shut down. I'll talk to you in the morning. So for me, psychologically speaking, I can't always be on. It makes me very anxious. And so I have a very clear division between working and when I'm not working. I also want to point out your movie hobby, for instance, you don't just watch movies. from what I've read, you also dive into critiques of them and you really explore it as a full-fledged passion. And I think that turning things that you like or that you're interested in a little bit into more of a full-fledged passion can be really a great idea for people or a way to build those hobbies into their life in a greater way. And then also with reading, I know so many people say

reading feels really, really hard. When I'm tired, I don't want to read. And I do think an advantage to living by many of your principles as we get our focus back. And then reading, I found this in myself, becomes a pleasurable activity again instead of something that feels incredibly difficult. Right. And I also think people make reading too much of a chore. Like, choose books that you love. Sometimes the simple part of it is like this type of book is inspiring to me.

This book is very interesting to me. And I see it a lot. People fall into this notion of just, what's the book I'm supposed to read? This whole, like, this is the novel that won this award and everyone is reading it. And now it sort of feels like a chore. I read incredibly diversely, much more nonfiction than fiction, but all over the place. And I let my interest drive it. So I read random stuff. It's like, okay, I'm reading a book about an octopus now. Now I'm reading a book about deep sea diving. And now I'm reading a book about theology and philosophy and that letting your interest drive you. Yeah, I agree. But also I will say I had to rediscover the value of hobbies. A lot of people have the same happening where your kids are really young. You lose track and lose touch with that. Because you're like, I can't. have hobbies. There's infants and toddlers around. It was almost like I had to rediscover it as my kids

got to elementary school age. No, no, no, it's good to have things that you really, really like. Like with movies, I have a group of dads. We all like movies and we rotate where we go and we go see revivals playing at different movie theaters. It's really nice. Okay, next problem. One of the things that we run into is people want to see that visible activity to know other people are working. Since we are often remote, our bosses want us to respond to chats, to respond to emails. We want to have signs that our coworkers are working as hard as us. And we view things like Zoom calls, being on chats, answering emails, all these things as signs that we're working.

So can you suggest some other signs we could use to indicate that we're working to our coworkers, to our bosses that aren't detracting from our ability to do real work? One of the big ways to push back on that pseudo-productive, let me just demonstrate activity with emails and quick responses mindset is making workloads more transparent. This is one of the big things we're lacking in modern knowledge work is we don't think enough about

how do we manage what's on our plate. So I'm going to give you a thought experiment, but imagine I have in a shared document or a Trello, like something that other people can see in my organization, I have a list of everything I'm working on. It's not some black box that no one knows this is what I'm working on. And maybe I have it divided at the front of the list,

active. These are the things I'm actively working working on right now. Other part of the list, an ordered queue of the things I'm waiting to work on. And as I finish something on my active list, I pull in the next thing from the waiting list. And now imagine you're able to make this transparent to other people. Like, hey, can you do this for me? Yeah, sure. I'm going to put it on my list. Here it is. You can watch it March to active. As soon as it gets to active, I'll let you know, hey, I'm working on this actively. Talk to me about this anytime and we'll get it done. It turns out that this works as well because you're solving the same problem that's being solved by, I just answer everything immediately.

So if I don't know how you organize your work, let's say I'm your boss, I don't know how you organize your work, I don't know what's on your plate. If there's something that comes into my world that I need done, it's a source of stress for me as long as I have to keep track of it. So if I ask you, like, hey, can you do this? Knowing nothing else, I would rather you just do it right away. Because until you do it, I'm just going to have to remember it because I don't know what's happening over there. If on the other hand, you say, sure, here it is, it's in position four, and you can watch, and I'll let you know as soon as it gets into the active lift, that solves the same problem for me. I don't have to worry about it anymore.

And that's ultimately the problem you're solving for other people is taking off their plate the stress of having to keep track of something that will otherwise be forgotten. If you take that stress off your plate, their plate, they're happy. So they only need an immediate response or immediate action if they feel as if I'm going to have to keep keeping track of this until it gets done. So when you get more transparent about your workloads. It's surprising, like, oh, I can actually take some more time. I can do things one at a time. I can reduce the administrative overhead. I can be much more structured about my work. A lot of options open up. Would you suggest we approach the conversation with our colleagues that way? Like, I'm not going to be super responsive on email or text, but you can look

into my whole workload in this place or in this way. Yeah, but I would never emphasize what you're not going to do. just emphasize what you're doing that makes their life easier. Like, yeah, happy to do this. In fact, who make your life easier? I'm making my work thing transparent. I put it right here. But by the way, you know the priorities even better because this is your task. So let me know if you want me to move it to another position. You can watch it here if you want, but I'll let you know as soon as it gets here as well. Everything is delivered in terms of here are extra things that will make your life easier. There's nothing you have to do. But here's all these extra options that are there if you want to that'll make your life easier. But never apologize.

for what you're not doing. It just emphasized the stuff you are doing that shows like, oh, I'm structured, I'm on the ball, I know what's going on. So same things with emails. Well, here's the thing. The quantity of those emails die down if you're only working on a small number of active projects at once. Things get much better.

In general, when people realize you were very organized, you earn a lot of leverage. This is actually a very powerful reputation to have within a knowledge work organization is you have your act together with managing your workload and your time. It gains you a huge amount of leeway and leverage because it means you are very good at solving the fundamental problem that people need you to solve, which is make my stress go away. Once people learn, you're on the ball. Here's your system. Okay, it's great. You're the person we come to to ask questions.

Hey, what do you think about this new planner? You've just gained yourself a lot of flexibility. Oh, that's such a good point. It's a good people tip in general. Okay, problem number three. A fear I have with putting more eggs in less baskets is what happens if those baskets don't pan out? And you share a lot of stories in your book of people who did things over a long period of time and had immense success with those things. But what about the people who put years into single projects and they don't pan out?

Well, you don't have to put fewer eggs in the basket. We can work with this metaphor a little bit, right? Okay. Like, imagine you have 12 eggs that you want to cook. If you try to cook all 12 eggs at the same time, it's really hard to keep track of them and it's really messy. So instead, imagine I just cook one egg at a time. And it turns out I cook the eggs much better. So a lot about doing less, does it necessarily mean accomplishing less total things?

It means working on less things concurrently. So you have less administrative overhead at any one moment, which means you're actually finishing things faster and at a higher level of quality. So just by simply saying, I do the same number of things, by only work on a small number of things at a time, the amount of things you'll accomplish, let's say in a year, will be higher. Because I agree with you. Now, this idea of having a few pursuits like you really spend a lot of time with, that does come as you get more interested in quality and craft. You'll find yourself naturally as you get better and better at certain things. The projects will get longer and there'll be fewer things you work on. But it's not fundamental that right away you have to say, I am just going to do this.

this one thing. I'm going to write this novel and it's going to be great or it's going to be a real problem if it's bad. You don't have to do that to slow down your productivity. Okay. And then my last problem that I run into, and I don't want to harp on it too much, but the email pings, the text messages feel like reward. And I'm sure this is just because my whole dopamine system in my brain is so messed up. But how do I get that feeling of reward when the things that I'm working on aren't necessarily paying off for a much longer period? of time. Partially, we just have to reduce the number of reward signals because it's reward in part because we're really hardwired. We know there's emails waiting for us. We know there's

text waiting for us. Our brain knows on the other side of those emails and text is another person in our tribe who needs something from us. That is a very hard signal to ignore because just if we're going to talk about evolution, it would be very dangerous in the Paleolithic if you had a habit of like, I ignore my tribe members. They need something. I'm ignoring them. You're going to get a rock in the back of your head. We take it very seriously. Even if our frontal cortex says it's not urgent, we have norms in the office that says if it's urgent, call and don't expect responses right away. And no one is actually literally upset at me. No one literally is going to hit me with a rock for not answering these emails. There's a deeper part of our

brain. Just like, no, no, no, no, someone needs us. It's very hard. And so, of course, the dopamine system fires up because it wants to push us to answer that need. So like what we really have to do is reduce the number of signals that are there just waiting for us. And that's where I think reducing unscheduled messaging as a collaboration tool really makes a difference, where we have these very structured, brief, but regularly scheduled team meetings, where as things come up, so I call this docket clearing, as things come up that we need to think about, we put it on a shared document that we call the docket. Like every day or every other day, we have a 45-minute meeting. We all get on the same Zoom room or whatever. And we just go through that list one by one.

Okay, what about this? You're going to do this? What do you need? When do you need it by? okay, I will get to do that to you by this day. Okay, this thing. Who's going to do this? What do you need? And what you've done there is in this 45-minute meeting, you've stopped dozens of ad hoc back and forth communication messages, right? You've significantly reduced the number of non-scheduled messages that are going to require

a reply because we're trying to figure this thing out back and forth. Interaction. If we can move it to individual office hours, like if I have a question for Liz, it requires more than a one-message response, she has office hours 30 minutes. I just pick up the phone. okay, I want to get your opinion about this. So you're moving more of this inner human communication off of unscheduled digital messages

and into other types of modes. Or if it's work that we can come up with a process for this work where we don't have to send emails back and forth. It's by close a business on Wednesday, the draft of all the social posts are in this document, in the Dropbox. I add my comments by noon on Thursday, and then the designer takes those and does the final mockups and posts them.

The more processes like this that prevent I just have to wait for something to show up. And if I'm not checking my inbox, there might be something there I need. That's what we really want to reduce. Because the unscheduled messages that we know might be coming is entirely capturing of our attention. It is very difficult to say, I got to go spend time over here. We're wired that way. And will that rewire my brain so that I'm not sort of sadly refreshing my email inbox

and hoping I get some email that will distract me from the deep work that I don't want to gear up to do? It will help a lot. Yes. Ritual and environment will help. Like, oh, when I'm doing the deep work, I've made my tea and gone to this other place. And I just don't do email in that place. That really helps as well. So you put those two things together. Now you're starting to do better. The third element you want to add in this, let's say now you're time blocking. One of the advantages of time blocking is that it frees you from having to make the decision throughout the day. Well, what should I do now? And in particular, should I check email now? If you're doing, your day freestyle. All right, what do I want to do next? Here's the problem. You know that there's

multiple times in the day you do need to check email, right? You can't just ignore it. So if you're doing your schedule freestyle, you have a part of your brain that's always asking you, well, what about now? What about now? What about now? You know, we're going to have to check it at some point. And so it's very difficult to resist that voice because it's pretty reasonable. You're like, okay, I guess we can do it now, because it's just telling you, we have to check email at some point, so why not now it wears you down. But if you have a schedule for your day, you're like, no, we're checking email in an hour. It's on the schedule. And the only commitment you have to make then is am I following my schedule or not? That requires much less mental energy than having to fight

with the email advocate inside your brain every minute of every day. What about now? What about now? What about now? You don't want to have to have that fight all the time. So you put those three things together. I think you will find the cognitive attraction of email will be significantly attenuated. Can you give us a few nitty-gritty tips for time blocking? I know a lot of people want to do it, but they find it tricky to get started with or they find that they're not doing it in a way that's really helpful. One of the keys for time blocking is it's okay for your time blocks to change. It's actually really hard the time block an eight-hour day and get it right,

and that's fine. I actually have a time-block planner. You can time-block in any piece of paper, but in my planner, there's a bunch of columns. And the whole idea is when you mess up your current schedule because something takes longer or whatever, you just move to the next column and make a new plan. And then when that one gets messed up, next time you get a chance, you move to the next column and make a new plan.

The goal with time blocking is not to win by making a plan that you stick with. The goal is to win by always having intention. I've thought about the time that remains and I have an idea for what I want to do with it. It might not completely work out, but at least I have an idea. I'm not just going freestyle. Another thing that matters for time blocking is you're probably at first going to give yourself not nearly enough time for everything. whatever you feel is a reasonable amount of time to do something, double it. Because we're just really bad at it.

You get better at it as you time block more. But at first, you're going to be super optimistic about how long things take and you're going to be way too short. So you have to just expand the amount of time you give for things. You can't just have a 10 minute sliver. Oh, empty my inbox. No, you need 90 minutes for that piece. Like, that's going to take a lot longer than you think.

So give yourself more time. So you want to give yourself grace. Yes, I'm not going to hit this. We're going to have to change to plan a few times. That's fine. And then give yourself way more time than you think you need for the things you're doing. And then last thing on doing fewer things, does this apply to our non-work tasks of our lives like cleaning the house and cooking meals and taking care of our kids and returning packages, all of these other things that fill our time? Is there a way to apply the do fewer things principle there? I think philosophically probably yes, but when it comes to like the technical explanation for why doing fewer things makes sense in work, it's a completely different type of dynamic than what goes on outside of work. So in work, it's all about the administrative overhead. If you have too much

administrative overhead, your day gets clogged with like productivity kudzu and you can't do anything else. Do we do too many things outside of work? I think yes as well. But it's almost a completely different philosophical question of what does it mean to have? like a successful family, like what do your kids actually need? It's like a much more complicated ground. I want someone to write a book about that because I want that advice. I'm really good at what happens during the workday. I need someone else to write a good book about what minimalism means when you're talking about, you know, life with three boys. That's a book I would definitely buy. But if you practice it in your workday, you'll at least have more time to zoom out and live the

rest of your life intentionally. It does help. And also if you're organized in your workday because you get all these advantages for being organized about, I keep track of what I'm working on, it's status, I make it transparent for other people who care, I plan at multiple scales. That definitely helps outside of your workday because it lowers the amount of cognitive cycles and stress you have to use just to get the things done that you have to do. So definitely being organized outside of your work life and like the way you are in your work life, that makes a big difference. Really young people often say, I don't want to be that organized outside of work because I just want to live my life and that's so constraining. And then you get the middle

age and you get a bunch of kids and you're like, organize me out. I am pulling my hair out here. I can't keep track of who's carpooling. I want AR goggles like a minority report moving around schedules to figure out who's dropping off lunch for who. It's funny how that changes. As your life outside of work gets more complicated, you're like, no, no, no, no, this is not Bohemia anymore. Like, give me a little bit of structure. I'm going to go crazy. Genuinely, the most used item in my kitchen is my Wonder Oven Pro from our place. It has sold out eight times. It's that good and it's finally back in stock. So get it before it's gone. The Wonder Evan Pro is an eight in one airfire, toaster oven dehydrator and so

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exciting. So I'm not a big believer that a tool can save you. In fact, I'm really wary of complicated tools, right? So I make heavy use of digital calendars, like it's not that exciting. I plan my day on a paper planner that's formatted well for doing time block planning. I keep my tasks in trellibords because the visual metaphor I like, and I like that I can attach files and put information on the back of the cards. But you could use, like, many different products to do this. I rely on shared documents a lot. Great.

I have information here. You can access it. So to me, it's system first. And then you say, what tool can I implement this with? And almost always it's something to a Google Workplace subscription is going to get you 95% of the way there. Principle 2 is work at a natural pace. Why is this important?

Well, humans aren't wired to work all out all day, all year. We're not wired in a sort of evolutionary sense. This was never what our expenditure of effort looked like. There was all sorts of variations within the day, within the week, within the year, huge amounts of variation. Then we had mills and factories emerge as a major place of economic activity. And for the first time in human history, we invented this idea of, no, no, just work really hard all day long. We just do this year round. There's no seasonal variation.

There's no variation during the day. We just always do this every day. And this was so intolerable that we had to invent labor unions and regulatory frameworks just to try to make this something that people could tolerate, right? Then knowledge work emerged. I'm like, well, how do we want to organize work? We say, let's just do the factory thing. Let's all gather eight hours, work really hard all day long. Very suspicious if you're ever not working really hard, and let's just do this all year.

It's not a natural way to work. It's exhausting for people. Of course, we don't actually work intensely all day long. We use pseudo productivity to try to fill in the gaps. but I don't think it's a natural way to do work using your brain. I think we should have a lot more variation and intensity on a lot of different time skills. It's a much more realistic picture of how we actually do things. How do we find where our natural pace meets?

I want to procrastinate. I'm feeling tired. My brain has been hijacked by social media. Oh, I know. It's so hard. Perfectionism, for example, will rise its head really easily as well. You have perfectionism and yet procrastination. and they're sort of swirling around any effort to say, I'm going to work on fewer things,

I'm going to take my time, I don't want to exhaust myself. They just swirl around any one of those decisions and try to destabilize it. They come at it from two different angles. And so we do have to be really careful about it. One thing that really matters is putting stakes in the ground. So I have committed to this person. They're going to get this thing. And it matters if I don't.

And they're going to look at it and it better be better than it was or it better be pretty good. So I'm going to have a stake in the ground. So I do not have endless time to procrastinate or to seek perfectionism. However, I'm going to put those stakes reasonable distances away. I'm committed to do this thing. But instead of committing to do it by Wednesday, I said, give me three weeks. So stakes in the ground that force you to actually do the work and care about the quality, but keeping the stakes far enough away that you don't have to scramble or work at an unrealistic level of intensity to finish the work,

that seems to be the sweet spot. And you have all these fun examples of famous artists, et cetera, sort of using this strategy. This is like the Beatles with Sergeant Pepper, releasing the single, so they want to spend too much time obsessing over their tape delay loops inside the Abbey Road studio. There's these kind of cool examples of famous examples of this being done, but it's a very practical idea. Commit the things, but make the commitments reasonable to actually get the work done. How can we implement working at a natural pace if we are working within a company that wants eight-hour days, that we have set vacation? We can't just have a month.

month or two where we're outputting less and then a month or two where we're outputting much more? Well, you kind of can is what I realized was because knowledge work is so ambiguous and obfuscated, like here's our workload system. We don't keep track of who's working on what. We don't have, okay, here's how we organize our work. It's really ambiguous and autonomous and obfuscated. This can be a source of a lot of problems. It's what allows people, for example, to become really overloaded because no one knows how much you're working on and everyone's just throwing work at everyone else. But you can, in like a judo move, take advantage of that reality to your advantage because you can subtly pull back for a month. No one notices. There's not a scoreboard somewhere

where there's like you've done seven units of work in June, but you only did six units of work in July. No, it's all just sort of like people are doing meetings and doing things and no one really knows. So you can leverage the obfuscation of office work to, subtly have some seasonality in your work to say, you know, December before like the holidays, people aren't really having a lot of meetings. I'm going to really pull back. And then I'm going to make a big January. But then I'm going to cycle back for two weeks at the beginning of March. You have a lot more control over that than you think. You don't announce it. You don't put new rules in the place. You don't wave a flag and say, here's what I'm doing. But you can cycle a lot

within knowledge work because no one really knows what anyone else is doing. Now, if you downcycle for six months or a year, which basically just becomes quiet quitting, it'll get noticed eventually. Right. So it can't be like, okay, 2025, I'm just not going to work very hard. And then 2026, I will. That'll get noticed. But if it's like going to take two weeks and really down cycle at the end of January, or in the summer, I'm going to do less than I do for the rest of the year, I think you can more often than not get away with that. And to bring us back to our egg metaphor, the idea is by stopping making eggs for a second and really thinking for a second about the omelet you want to create, you're going to create a better omelet. So you're doing more quality outputs for your

company or for yourself. If you work for yourself by engaging in these cycles, you're not just pulling back and not reaping rewards from that. Exactly. In the long run, you're producing better stuff, right? The self-reinforcing cycle of slow productivity is that the longer you do it, actually the better the stuff you produce, and the more leeway you get for doing more unusual things. So there's this nice feedback cycle. There's a company I talk about in the book that, for example, has cycles literally using that term built into the way they run their company. They say, okay, here is how you operate as an employee. You have up cycles, which are four to six weeks long, where you're working on a small number of really important things, and then you have a

down cycle, which is two to three weeks long. Don't do a lot of big things during that. time. You need to reflect, what do I need to work on next? What went wrong with the thing I did? Close up all the loose ends on the big project you were doing and recharge. And the employee handbook at this company is very clear. It says it's tempting to want to just add more things into the down cycle. Don't. That's not going to actually be good for the company in the long run. We want you to take the down cycles as really being a lot less stuff than the up cycles because if you do this over the year, you'll have produced much better stuff than if in the short term, you try to jam more in. So this is an example of a company that has explicitly put cycling into their employee handbook because they realize they produce more. So if you're doing this

sort of subtly, you'll be okay because what's going to be noticed over the year is, oh, wow, you've done some really great stuff. You've really produced some stuff we're proud of. Great. We're completely happy with you, right? So yeah, you're absolutely right. The omelet you make is going to be much better if you're not trying to break all four eggs at the same time. And is the idea to what we were talking about earlier's point that we will have created systems and processes in our up cycle times. So we won't need to be working really, really hard during the down cycle times just to keep things afloat.

Yeah, because as you move more towards the sort of structured workloads, you have less of this administrative overhead that you have to like jump around and be very busy with. And now you can take advantage of that reality. So people can see like, oh yeah, you're marching through projects. A lot of stuff is getting done. you have less meetings and emails that you have to frantically deal with. Now it's much easier. When I finish this project, I'm going to move this project to active, but maybe not really get started for a week. Or I'm going to sit on this project, even after it's basically done, when you have

this much more streamlined, structured way of handling your workload, now you really do have a lot more knobs to turn in terms of like when you're working or how long you're working. You find, for example, with a lot less administrative overhead, you can do things like I'm really working in the morning on this project and then not doing anything in the afternoon effectively. I'm doing half days. Like, this is something a lot of people do. And it's fine, because I can only do three or four hard hours on this thing anyways. And it moves through and it gets done. You have a lot more flexibility once you're getting pretty structured about how you manage your workload, how you talk and communicate about your work. What if you have identified your natural pace and you want to work at that pace,

but your boss thinks your natural pace is faster and wants a faster turnaround? Well, when you move to this poll-based system where I have a small number of active projects at a time, your pace of completion is going to go up. So you will probably be outpacing almost anyone else in your company that's trying to do four or five things at the same time, just because you're dealing with a fraction of the administrative overhead. So the amount of time per day you can spend actually making progress towards completion, that really jumps up. One of the advantages of managing your workload is doing fewer things it wants is you're going to be fast. you're going to be fast compared to other people, even though to you, to you, it'll feel much slower because you have a lot less going on and you're moving from one thing to another.

We don't realize the degree to which we're going really slow in our work because we're so gunked up with the administrative overhead. It's a log jam. We sent too many of these project logs down to river, and they all get jammed, and then none make it through. So when you just send less logs down the river, a lot more are making it to the mill. It's not really an issue people have when they embrace doing fewer things. They tend to get the opposite result, which is their boss are saying, wow, I don't know what you're taking, but like, you're really getting things done. Why can't the other people do it like this?

Why can't you be like Liz? You get the opposite response. Pragmatic action steps. We've talked about a few. But if we wanted to just experiment with finding our natural pace and working on it, what would you do first? For most people, it's going to be the big things you're actively working on really should be two at most, maybe three. So there's just some like hard and fast rules here. Just because the

amount of administrative overhead generated by work, once you get to like four or five major things, too many different things are going on. So that's going to make a big difference. Then feeling out your seasonal rhythm, that's more personal. So what is your up cycle, down cycle? What does those cycles feel like? How long are they? That is really personal. Some people like to go multiple seasons in a row really up and then like a pretty long season cycle down. Other people have a much smaller up, cycle down cycle in actual rhythm. Like I want to do three hard weeks and then a soft week. Like one week every month that's a little softer than the other. Or it's, I want to go like three hard days each week, but like Mondays and Fridays, I go less hard. It's hard to discover

except through experience. It's like you're listening to your intuition. When do you feel exhausted? Okay, I'm feeling too exhausted right now. What relieves that exhaustion? So it's like a self experimentation or self-discovery you need to do to figure out what is my pace of variation of intensity. What do you do? I'm on the seasonal schedule in terms of the first example I talked about. Summers, I really down cycle. And then during the academic year, now this is a natural fit for a professor, right, because it works out that way. But what I like to do is through the two semesters, I'll be pretty up during those semesters, but down cycle pretty intensely at the end of the semester. So the semester ends and it's like exam periods and break. So in December and in May,

really down cycle during the breaks. And then have two different characters to the semester. So typically I'll have all my teaching in one semester. That's like a very student-focused semester. I want to teach and be there for the students and that's what matters. And then much more of a research-focused semester or a book, like right now I'm in a book semester. It's intense but a different feel. And then summer I disappear. I really fall off. I don't take salary from my institution during the summer, I completely wind things down and have like a drastic like two or three month recharge period. That's what works for me. And do you view down cycle time as a time to restore and recharge so you can do better work? Or is that a time where we should more be

prioritizing all of the many other things that make life worth living? Or do those go hand in hand? It's all of those things. Yeah. That latter point, that's like the traditional sort of Shabbat, going back to sort of the Hebrew Bible notion, Genesis of Shabbat, the idea is this one day a week, it's meant to be a day to look at everything else and say it is good. It's a day for gratitude. I do like that notion with down cycles as well. The down cycle, if we extend the metaphor of Shabbat, is not about instrumentally preparing yourself to work again, but to actually have gratitude for the creation is good, all the other stuff in the world that is good. I think that's really important. It's also a good time to figure out what to do next.

We underestimate how hard it is to figure out the right thing to do. So the company I talked about before that has the mandatory down cycles, that's a big part of their motivation is we want you to take longer and think harder about what's worth doing. And it actually kind of makes sense if you think about it because if you pick something that's not that important and you spend six weeks on it, that's a lot of energy and concentration and manpower, like working on something that didn't really matter, it would rather you spend a little more time to make sure the project's going to be really important.

And reflection is important too. You need time to understand what you've just been working on. Was this important or not? What did I learn from it? What else is going on in my life? Let me step back. What's going on with work? If you don't have time just to sit and reflect on your life, you're going to get pulled

along, and then you're going to look up one day and be very far from the shore you thought you were on. So I think all of those things mix into down cycles. So certainly it's bad if you have none of that. If it's just go, go, go, always overloaded all year round. If you get none of those things, that can't be a good situation. Principle 3, obsess over quality. You have said that this is what it all pivots around, that the first two fall apart without

principle 3. Can you explain why? Yeah, so 3 says figure out what's important about what you do and keep trying to do that thing better, like really care about doing things well, especially like the main things you do at a very high level, this is what fuels the other two. And it does so in two ways. One, when you begin to really care about quality, busyness becomes unnatural to you. You don't have to convince yourself anymore that pseudo productivity is not the right way to go. When you don't care about quality, it could be scary to leave sort of productivity. Like, what else do I have? And if I'm not

visibly active all the time, then I'm not anything. And who am I to get away with this? But when you start to really care about quality, then suddenly like, man, these emails, these meetings, all the stuff going on, this mystery of overhead, that's getting in the way of doing this thing better. And so suddenly that busyness becomes anathema. And it becomes the most natural thing in the world that you want to slow down. At the same time, as you get better at the things you do best, you're leveraged to slow things down increases. So you get this nice sort of virtuous cycle.

As you get better at something really valuable, you get this instinct to be less busy. And then over time, you gain the ability to act on that instinct. So this very same initiative, I want to get better at something that really matters to me. This very same initiative both gives you the instinct to slow down and the leverage you need to actually achieve that goal. Does that mean that you have to care about your job and not just be looking for a paycheck? Well, at the very least, you have to care about something you do in your job. And if it's not there, invent it. Okay, I'm going to change within my same position, like what I'm working.

on, I'm going to volunteer to work on this instead of that, because what I need is something that is hard that I can do well and I can get better at. And as I get better at it, I'll get recognized for that and get more leverage. If I call it the accumulation of career capital, if you don't have the ability to accumulate career capital, which is I'm getting better and better at something that's rare and valuable, it is very difficult for you to craft your working life into something that matches you and is sustainable and is rewarding. It really is the key engine of designing a professional life that over time becomes increasingly sustainable and rewarding. So yeah, if your job has none of that, you need to start figuring out how do I get something

like that into my job? I heard you give a variation of that advice to people in their 20s who are just starting their careers. Could you share how somebody who's approaching their career in this way would make different choices early on? Yeah, I think early, early. your career, it's all about getting as much career capital as possible as quickly as possible. You can't expect your job to be great until you're great at something. So in your first years in a job, you should not have your antenna up saying, what is this job offering me? Do I like this job? Is another job going to be better? Like, what do I deserve? Instead, you need to flip that around and be saying, how could I be better at this job? How could I prove that I'm valuable to the world?

How can I build up a skill as quickly as possible? Because it's that skill. It's that skill. that accumulation of career capital that four or five years down the line is going to start giving you some real interesting options about how you shape your work life. I think too often we skip that step. And we just think about like there's a flat collection landscape of possible jobs with different properties. And it's just about finding the one that matches you well that has all the stuff you want and then you'll be happy. No, it's a mountain. And as you move up the mountain, the jobs get more interesting and you get more control and you get more options about what your work life works like. So when you're young and have time and energy, you need to start getting as

high as possible early on, get past those base camps so that, you know, as you get a little bit older, now you have some interesting options. Well, I can do this part-time. And you get past those base camps by accumulating skills that only you have, essentially. You keep asking, how can I be more valuable? How can I be more valuable? That becomes the mantra. When you get a little bit older, you need to start asking, how can I take my value out for a spin? In my life, leveraging my value to take control of what my working life is like. Am I in the driver's seat of my professional existence? I call it the control trap. As you get better at things that are valuable, you get herded more and more into these very rigid paths. You have more and more people encouraging.

You're like, no, no, no, you're getting really good at this. Like, let's keep moving. Like, you can become a partner, keep doing more work. Exactly when you get good enough to get control is when you're going to have all the pressure in the world, not to do anything different than the prescribed path. So it's like this flip switches. At first, it's, I just need to focus on getting better. And then at some point, it switches and you say, I need to make sure that now I'm using my leverage from being good in ways that really resonate with me. The problem is a lot of young people skip the first part.

It's like very early in their career, like, I want to shape exactly what my job is like. Like, why can I work one day with my dog and not have to do anything hard? You skip the first step where you've made yourself sort of indispensable and valuable to people who really need what you can do well. You have to do that first step first. Then you can start saying, what do I want my job to look like? Or a lot of young people, I think you said this earlier, but they just go through and check off the boxes of their job without thinking, like,

how am I making myself valuable? How am I building of skills that people are going to rely on just me for? I think it's really important to realize that. I think also people don't necessarily understand the degree to which it is impossible for employers to find good people. Like, if you're good, you're organized, you're on the ball, you don't drop things, you're building up skills that are valuable. They're desperate to keep you. And it's easy, I think, to fall into the mindset of my boss is just a mustache twirler who just likes to exploit me and will fire me at a moment's notice.

The opposite begins to happen as you get good. Your boss is sweating in the back room of like, how would we ever replace Liz? It's really hard to hire people. Like, people are weird. You hire them and then it's like, oh, they're wearing, you know, they're wearing their Star Trek costume to work. People are weird. It's really hard. So you have to recognize, like, if I'm good, like, people are desperate to keep me.

You have a lot more leverage than you think. But yeah, you do have to get good first, right? If it's just like checking boxes and I'm entirely starting with the attitude of just the fact I have to do this work, I don't feel fully comfortable with and why am I even have to have a job? And I'm looking for all the ways that this job is like doing things I don't like. The version of yourself 10 years from now is going to be really upset at the version of you now because you're,

life 10 years from now could be really cool and flexible and engaging and impactful and meaningful, but it requires that right now you focus on, well, what can I do here that's going to be really useful? How can I get good? How can I make my boss really worried about losing me? So we're obsessing over quality. How do we know what high quality is? It feels kind of like an esoteric thing to work toward, and I would love to ground it a little bit. And it's important to emphasize that we don't think about taste enough. So that's the term I use in the book is your taste is your ability to discern what good means. I make this point, we don't think enough about how do you actually develop your sense of taste.

We just sort of assume you know what good is. So what you got to do is just like really work and practice until you can produce something that matches your definition of good. And I say, well, wait a second. No, first things first, you should work on understanding what good is. Like, what does it mean? You have to really understand movies before you can make a really good movie. You have to know why you love these movies before you can make a movie that's going to be really good.

You got to start with your taste, which means you have to actually investigate your own job, like you're a journalist. What's important in this job? Who does this really well? Why is the stuff they do considered good? And you have to investigate. And this might actually mean practically taking people out for coffee. Like, I really want to talk to you. You moved up fast in this company.

So what is it? Oh, it's this thing you do. Okay. What's the difference between how you do that? that and how other people do that who are not moving up as fast. Oh, so this is what matters here. What are the things that other people spend a lot of time on than you've learned don't really matter for this position? It's like you're writing a business advice book about your specific job. You should have that mindset. Like, I'm going out there to investigate what good means

in this position. Where am I trying to get? What are the examples I'm going towards? Like, develop that sense of taste so you know where you're aiming your efforts. Is step one of that just analyzing things that are proximate to that territory? Let's say that you're starting a company and you feel like you're doing something really new. You're starting a podcast. You're doing something on social media. You're writing a book that's never been written before. Are you analyzing that which is proximate to the new thing you're trying to create? Also, typically before you get to the new thing, you're doing a lot of standard things well. Right. You don't often start with, I have this brand new thing I'm going to do from scratch. It's like, I'm going to learn how to do the basic things well. I'm going to learn,

okay, at this level of my job, well means, like the reports I produce are well researched. They answer the questions that people have. They're formatted really nice. There's no mistakes. Okay, now I know what that means. Okay, now at the next level of my job, here's what I'm working on. It's usually a few steps into that before you get to this territory of I'm doing something

really new. And when you're doing something really new and innovative, almost always that idea is going to be found in Stuart Kaufman called this the adjacent possible. the adjacent possible that's just beyond the cutting edge in that field. So to identify, okay, here's something new that's going to be really valuable, you already have to have mastered these things on the cutting edge. And only then can you see, oh, if I take this, but I combine it with that and I take that out, this could be really valuable.

A big mistake people make often is trying to just jump all the way to the innovation from scratch. But you've got to get to the cutting edge first before you can see the new possible configurations in the adjacent possible. And that's like a process of doing the stuff that people have always valued, doing that really well. And you move your way towards the cutting edge. And then you can start to see brand new things to do. I've been drinking element every single day for literally years. I usually use one packet a day, but I break it up and I kind of spike my water throughout the day. So it makes my water taste amazing. And it helps me stay consistently hydrated, which for me means more energy, fewer headaches and way clearer thinking. That's like probably the biggest difference. I know this is my brain. just works so much better.

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How does obsessing over quality fit in with the idea that done is better than perfect? Yeah, so you have to care about quality, but you can't obsess about the thing you're doing right now being perfect. Right. So this is the perfectionism you have to get around. One way I do it, for example, is like when I'm writing a book, I'll always say the next book, book, the one after this is going to be the game changer and perfect and catch all the attention. This is practice for that one. So I want to make this good, but no, this doesn't have to be the perfect thing. It's going to like blow the side. The next book is going to be the one that like I'm going to be remembered for. So let me just make this one really good, obviously, but that's the one

that's going to matter. I do a lot of that. This one should be good, but the next one's going to be great. And that helps keep me, for example, from getting paralyzed. It's not all the chips aren't on the table for this thing I'm doing. So that's always been helpful to me. Has it become harder at all for you to write as your books have experienced such phenomenal success? Yeah. It's harder in a couple ways. I mean, one way is just more people pay attention to them, which is interesting. A lot of my books were cult classics.

It came out, not a big fuss was made, they kind of disappeared, and then slowly word of mouth, they built up over time to sell a huge number of copies. Which is a fantastic way, by the way, to sell a lot of books because it just happens quietly. And then over time, there's a big audience who likes what you're doing. It's not like that anymore. Now, if I'm launching a book, this could be a much more major thing. Like, slow productivity was number two on the New York Times bestseller list, which means there's going to be right away a huge amount of scrutiny, including the negative scrutiny and the positive scrutiny.

I do have to adapt to that. It's a completely different world now. I'm curious, what has been some of the criticisms that you've heard of the idea of slow productivity? And do you have a response to those criticisms? Some of the criticism comes from the reality that I work in two worlds. So on the one hand, I'm an academic, I'm a digital theorist, I'm a professor, I help found the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown, and I'm on the contributor staff of the New Yorker,

so I'm writing, it's like highbrow and academic work. But in my books, I like to center on advice. I've been writing books professionally since I was 21 years old, and I really love the genre that has concrete advice. But these are two different worlds. So sometimes what will happen is these words. worlds will overlap. So like a reviewer will come in who would never normally review a book that has advice, but they will review it because, oh, I know Cal from like the New Yorker or whatever,

and then they'll just be aghast. He's telling people what to do. How can you give people advice? How do you know that's the right thing to do? It's a complete code switch mismatch. So there's a lot of that coming on of like, this isn't a general nonfiction book that's just doing criticism about how capitalism functions. So I get a lot of that now because I exist in both worlds. And my only response to that is like actually I think more people should be thinking about giving advice. I think it's important. You put advice out in the world, trust the sophistication of your readers to adapt it to, does this apply or not? Oh, this piece applies, but that piece doesn't apply. How do I adjust this to my circumstance? So I do get a lot of that and there's not much I can do

about it. I like writing with my books. I like writing advice books. I think it's an underserved, not enough people are playing in that genre. So there's that piece of it. Another critique I get is, well, you seem busy. So why are you writing a book about slow productivity? To which I answer, well, I'm not as busy as you think. I sequence things. I do things one thing at a time. I take the summers off and it adds up over time to look like a lot.

That's kind of the point. The paradox of slow productivity is when you do less and slow down, you produce more stuff that people notice. So that's another critique I've been getting is like, you seem too busy. And then there's a whole other critique which I get, which says don't give advice about how to deal with the overload of work. What we need to do is get rid of capitalism and just restructure the world of work. And if you give advice, you're going to normalize the status quo.

We need everything right now to be more revolutionary. And I get it, but that's not my mode. Well, and that's a heady, you know, thing to do to restructure our entire system. Yeah, it's not so easy. So while we're waiting for late stage capitalism, the collapse and the new UBI-powered utopia to emerge, in the meantime, we're kind of. It's not overloaded, and maybe there's something we can do about it next week. Yeah, exactly.

A lot of the stories in the book involve years of feeling like a failure before feeling like a success. I'm curious, how should a person evaluate if they are in those years, if those are their failure years that are going to lead to a greater success or if they are failure years and they should cut their losses and move on? Yeah, objective feedback is important. Right. So you have to figure out in my world, where can I get feedback? It's going to be honest. Like, this is good. And more importantly, this is better than it was before. Like, how do you actually get that honest feedback? Because the answer is not typically just asking people you know because people are nice. So you're like, how's my novel? Is my book idea? I've been working on this book for like 20 years. I'm like, yeah, it's great. You should do it. We love it. You actually have to find how to get much more objective feedback. Well, it's easier to get an agent than a sell a book. So I've been trying to get an agent and they don't,

like the book, that's feedback of something's not right here. I need to rethink what I'm doing or I don't have the necessary skill base. So I think that matters. The other thing that matters is evidence-based goal pursuits. So like this comes up a lot, especially with sort of aspirational pursuits where instead of interrogating the reality of how people succeed at this particular thing I care about, you write your own story. You want to be true. In my world of book writing, this happens all the time, where instead of asking, how does someone end up successfully writing and publishing a book like this. Like, what's the process?

What are people looking for? What are the things you need to get past these different stages? They write their own story. Like, no, what matters is I'm going to write every morning for an hour and I'm going to do an in run around the industry and then I'm going to publish it on KDP. And they just invent a story that they want to be true because it's maybe less fraught or it's easier or it's more exciting. And that almost never works.

So if you can actually talk to people and figure out, how does this thing I want to do work? Like, what are the steps and how do you do it well or not? that really matters. And then getting the objective feedback along the way, am I in the game or not? You might have to be in the game for a while until you find your niche, but am I in the game? Am I playing at the professional level? You have to get that brutal feedback and you need the brutally honest story about how these different worlds work. Don't write your own story. You need both of those things going on. Do you have any favorite ways to use AI to increase low productivity? I write about AI quite a bit for the New Yorker right now. I don't use it a lot yet. I don't think it's

current iteration is the iteration in which it's going to have its first major cultural economic impact. Right now, it's like writing carefully crafted prompts into a chat interface. I'm not as interested in the form of AI where that's what we're doing. I think it is going to get more integrated into like the work we do and the tools we do in the future. And when it does, it's going to be unavoidable and just going to make things easier or faster. And so I'm waiting for that. I'm not a big believer that unless it's interesting to you as a hobby, that right now you need to be spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to carefully craft prompts the chat GPT to get it to do something you want to do. Give it another year for them to have one more iteration of this

technology. And it's going to be like jumping from Alta Vista to Google. Like, oh, now I see how to use this. It's self-evident why this is useful to be. I don't think it's self-evident for a lot of people yet. Do you think, though, the winners in the work world in the future are going to be people who are adept at using AI tools? I mean, I think it's like saying in the late 1980s, are the winners going to be people who are adept at using personal computers? And it's like, well, to some sense, yes, you're going to have to use a personal computer in the world of work. Like, they're going to become ubiquitous. But on the other hand, it's not going to be that hard to learn. Everyone's going to be given a computer and you're going to have to figure it out.

Like, there's not some special prep you had to do in 1989 to be ready to be using Windows in 1993 at your gateway computer at your desk. It wasn't that hard to learn. Like, wait till the time comes. Often, the early forms of the technologies that have a big impact on the world of work are not in the form factor in which they spread. So you can spend a lot of energy learning the technology in its early form, and it's not going to be relevant. So like, if you were really early on personal computers, for example, and you correctly predicted, everyone's going to use one of these things in work, what did early personal computers look like? Well, for one thing, you spent most of your time writing your own computer programs. And guess what? We use computers everywhere now.

No one programs them anymore. We invented operating systems and it got much easier. So I'm very interested in AI. But I think the way it's going to affect our lives is going to be obvious, in the way that Google was obvious, in the way that email was obvious. When email finally spread in the 90s, people said, this just makes sense. I can send a message to someone like a mail message for my computer. Here's their name. Here's the message. I press sent. It took me nine seconds to learn. This is great, right? And then everyone started using it. AI is going to have that email moment. I don't think in its current form factor, though. You've written like a million books. Are there any principles from previous books that you still utilize on a day-to-day basis?

Oh, yeah. They often build on each other in interesting ways. So in 2012, I wrote a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You, which was arguing that follow your passion is bad advice. That's not how people end up passionate about their work. But then the flip side of that book, is, well, what does matter getting good at things that are valuable, which is a topic we've talked about sort of, you know, throughout this interview. A follow-up question to that was, well, how do I get good at things that are valuable? Well, that led to my next book, Deep Work. And I still build my working life around the ideas of deep work that focus concentration is what produces the really valuable things. So make sure you have a lot of time where you're doing undistracted

focus on the things that really matter. Then we got digital minimalism. That's my whole philosophy about digital being very intentional about how you use your phone, and that's very important to me. World Without Email is a follow-up, the deep work. All of these books, they all sort of connect. A lot of the more recent books all come from the same place of understanding where technology messed up work, and now we have to figure out how to deal with the problems of it.

It's like pseudo-productivity. Then we got email and computers, and pseudo-productivity became unbearable. Now, how do we deal with it? We used to be able to focus. Then we got distracted with computers. How do we change our work? So that goes through a lot of my work as well,

as trying to understand technology's impacts and then how we respond to those impacts. So that web is pretty interconnected. Can you leave us with just one homework assignment, something that we can all start doing today to bring more slow productivity into our lives? It might take you a while to find all this, but write down everything that is beyond a task you can complete in an hour or less. Everything bigger than that that you've committed to, write it down. And just confront, this is my work.

Just seeing your workload there, all sorts of good stuff comes from that because, A, you realize I'm overloaded. Let me stop taking new things on. B, you start thinking, like, I could take half of these things off here right now. Let me tell them, stop doing this. Tell this person, like, I need to get this list more reasonable. And then the third things that comes out of it is you can start saying, well, let me partition this list. These are the things I'm working on this week. These things can wait.

All of this good stuff happens when you can just say, this is what I'm working. working on. You can't slow down when you don't actually, you know, see the track ahead of you or you don't have your hands on the wheel. So just write down and confront whether it's scary or not everything you're actually working on and let that be the starting place of saying, okay, here's where I am. Where do I want to go? I love that. I'm obsessed with all of your books. I loved slow productivity. Can you tell us a little bit about it in your own words? Slow productivity is, in some sense, my answer to the question, how is it possible to produce stuff that I'm proud of and is valuable and meaningful without burning out and without having work take over all aspects of my life? To me, I think that's the key question of this sort of post-pandemic moment in knowledge work.

My readers and podcast listeners care about this. I really care about this because my three boys are now all elementary school age and need basically every single dad minute podcast. And so this question is a really urgent one for me and a lot of people. Slow productivity is my answer to it. You work on fewer things at once. You have a natural pace, more variations in intensity, but also caring about longer timescales and not very small timescales. And then you couple that with a commitment to doing the things you do really well. Those three principles gives you an approach to productivity that I think allows you to produce stuff you're proud of and matters and you can pay the mortgage and have options.

but not have work conquer your life. I, like a lot of people, are done with the fast demands, a pseudo-productivity, but I'm also not ready to just check out from the world to work and see what happens. Slow productivity is my response. And I love an advice book, and you share a lot of really wonderful advice in this book, so I highly encourage everybody to check it out. Thank you so much for taking the time today. I love this conversation.

Well, thank you. I really enjoyed it. We've implemented so many things from this episode. on my team already. I am already thinking about the idea of on periods and off periods and how we can implement those, more transparent work with less constant check-ins. And I'm just excited to reframe productivity from checking off to do-list to actually moving things forward. And I cannot wait to hear what that looks like in your life. Please share this podcast with anybody that you think would benefit, which I feel like is all of us because pseudo-productivity is everywhere these days. Also,

share it on your work slack. I feel like this is a very important conversation that we should all be having at work and maybe it will inspire managers to implement things differently on their teams. And if you are a manager, could you rethink some things? What flexibility do you have to begin to implement some of these strategies so that you can get more things accomplished instead of just chatting all day and not actually moving the needle on anything? If someone shared a link to this episode with you and you are new to the podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. If you're not following the podcast, all you have to do is go to the main podcast page on whatever platform you like to listen on. That's going to be the one that lists all of the Liz Moody podcast episodes.

You will see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts. This way you'll not miss out on any new episodes. They'll appear right in your feed. Okay. I love you. And I love you. And I'm I will see you next Wednesday for the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist,

or any other qualified professional. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can.

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